"Mr. bin Laden? Your casket is ready."

The above is an image of a Predator drone, and according to The Washington Times if we locate where Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan, we are free to dispatch these to ensure he meets Allah up close and personal:

The United States has a standing agreement with Pakistan that CIA-operated Predator drones may strike Osama bin Laden's hide-out without prior permission from Islamabad, according to people familiar with the arrangement.

One source said the free hand - an exception in a country politically sensitive to U.S. counterterrorism operations - was granted by President Pervez Musharraf early in the war if the U.S. locates bin Laden in Pakistan's rugged tribal areas, where he is thought to be hiding.

A knowledgeable official disclosed the arrangement to The Washington Times at a time of growing frustration in the Pentagon and in the CIA that bin Laden remains at large seven years into the war and as President Bush's term approaches an end.

That fact has put renewed focus on the Pakistani government's restraints on the U.S. effort to find bin Laden. Pakistan prohibits American military ground forces on its soil, limiting the U.S. presence to scores of CIA officers and paramilitary operators.

Nadeem Kiani, spokesman at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, declined to comment on the purported bin Laden deal but said Pakistan stands ready to move against bin Laden if he is inside the country.

Pakistan allowed the CIA to secretly launch missile-equipped Predators from its soil into Afghanistan during the war to oust the Taliban. It has continued to let the agency fly the unmanned surveillance planes over Pakistan.

But earlier this year, Mr. Musharraf rejected a Bush administration request to allow more CIA personnel into his country. Washington must coordinate planned strikes on militants in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) where bin Laden is thought to be hiding. Bin Laden as a target is an exception to that rule.

Now a few will ask "why is this kept kept on the hush-hush?" Simply put, we really can't trust the Pakistani's intelligence service to keep it's yap shut. There's more than one report that implicates the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) in working with the Taliban remnants in the Waziristan region. The region, thanks to Musharraf's idiotic deal of "amnesty" has become a hotbed for the Taliban and al Qaeda fighters that jump the border to engage NATO and Coalition forces.

This agreement allows us the latitude we need to nail bin Laden if he's still alive. Last July Marcie picked up on the bin Laden video tape that the press claimed was new, but was in fact quite old, prompting us to concur with the idea that he is definitely dead. So of he is, there is a Predator waiting above, and a Hellfire with his name written all over it. Furthermore, we can look at this development in a different light. We know that Ayman al-Zawahiri has to be killed, too. The CIA officers in Pakistan could easily "misidentify" Zawahiri as bin Laden, and call in a strike. I only say that because of the point Marcie made in that post about letters found in the Red Mosque stand-off that showed the militants were taking orders from Zawahiri. So, he is equally a target and equally dangerous.

Publius II